Suicide of their son spurs action
Couple vowed to fight bullying, boost youth mental health
EDGAR - The first time Angela and Steve Wesener saw the billboard along State 29 near Wausau, “it was a kick in the gut,” Steve said. The couple sobbed and clung to each other, their embrace the only thing keeping them on their feet.
The sign’s message: “Stand Up, Speak Out, Stop Bullying.” And emblazoned on its top right side: “Jonathan Wesener.”
Jonathan was their son.
For almost four years, the blue-hued billboard has been a daily reminder to drivers that bullying is preventable and when it isn’t stopped, the end for the tormented victim can be suicide. An anonymous donor paid for the billboard message and will continue it indefinitely.
If they had the spare cash, Angela said, bill-
boards throughout Wisconsin would carry the same message. The family lives near Edgar, a community of 1,455 people about 25 miles west of Wausau. It wasn’t until after their son, 16-yearold Jonathan, died by suicide in 2015 that they learned he had endured bullying while a student at Edgar High School.
“We want people to know about Jonathan,” Angela said. She shakes her head and tears fill her eyes.
Jonathan was a compassionate teen who teased his mother about her cooking and sought advice from his older sisters about his college plans to study engineering. He was on the football team. None of his teachers ever noted Jonathan may have been depressed or unusually sad. His grades were good.
“Someone told me I should have raised my son to be tougher,” said Angela, her face contorted with grief and disbelief. “We raised all of our children to be kind, respectful, good kids. We didn’t raise them to be mean.”
Jonathan’s 2015 death sparked protests in Edgar, as the Weseners and other community members successfully advocated for policy changes at Edgar schools that would make it easier to report instances of bullying and track them to a resolution. It also helped lead a statewide conversation about an alarming trend in Wisconsin’s teen suicide rate. According to the 2018 annual report of Wisconsin’s Office of Children’s Mental Health, the state’s youth suicide rates increased more than national rates from 2015 to 2016, from 7.5 per 100,000 to 9.8 per 100,000.
For the Weseners, the way people talk about suicide, mental health and even the way schools consider bullying has changed for the better in the years since Jonathan’s death. Their question is whether it has changed enough.
When USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin in January 2016 launched Kids in Crisis, its reporting series on youth mental health, the Weseners shared Jonathan’s story with reporters out of a hope to raise awareness about bullying, mental health and suicide.
Their ultimate goal was to end bullying and prevent another youth suicide.
“It’s heartbreaking every time we hear about another suicide,” Angela
Kids in Crisis series
Children's Hospital of Wisconsin proudly supports community solutions resulting from the Kids in Crisis series. chw.org/talk
said, adding their grief slowly percolates to the surface with each death. They wrap their arms around each other and grieve for another child.
Jonathan’s Facebook page is maintained by Angela, where she often responds to people posting about suicidal thoughts or grieving the loss of a loved one.
“There are people looking at Jonathan’s Facebook from all over Wisconsin, really the world, even the Middle East. I let them know that it’s good to reach out and talk with someone about how you feel and that it might be terrible right now, but tomorrow is a new day, a better day,” she said.
The initiation of a 24-hour statewide suicide text line (available by texting HOPELINE at 741-741) also is a valuable resource for youth because they can reach out and communicate at any time when feeling distraught, Angela said.
How bullying and youth mental health issues connect
When the Kids in Crisis series launched with the story about Jonathan’s death, his parents believed bullying was the root cause of their son’s suicide.
Jonathan’s suicide seemed to come without warning, Angela and Steve said.
“I think Jonathan was wired in such a way that he would take all these jabs, these insults and hold them inside in such a way that he wasn’t able to let it go and just forget about it and keep going on,” Steve said. “It kept building up and finally he just couldn’t take it anymore and he started shutting doors. And we didn’t see any of these doors being shut until after he died.”
In a series of stories to publish between February and May, the 2019 Kids in Crisis series this year will look at how schools respond to instances of bullying and what solutions the research says works. We’ll ask if anything has changed since Kids in Crisis reporting started, and we’ll look at the impact of teaching bystanders to intervene.
The association between bullying and suicide is complex, and a range of other factors, including depression or low self-esteem, matter for any particular person, said Melissa Holt, an associate professor in counseling psychology at Boston University. For 20 years, Holt has studied bullying and its relationship to violence in homes, schools and communities. Her research also has explored resiliency to bullying among youth.
While there is a link between bullying and suicide, bullying does not cause suicide, Holt said. Rather, a variety of other factors, including prior mental health history, contribute to how youth cope with bullying and whether they act on suicidal thoughts.
“We know that targets of bullying are more likely to experience depression and anxiety, and a decreased sense of school belonging,” Holt said.
“With respect to the link between bullying involvement and suicide specifically, research also supports an association.”
Holt’s research and that of others in
her field have found that youth involved in any capacity, whether the bully or the person being bullied, are more likely to think about and attempt suicide than youth not involved in bullying.
Risk factors related to suicide include:
how connected a teen is to his or her school
how connected a teen is to adults in his or her life
how well a teen responds to emotional distress
whether a teen is abusing drugs or alcohol
whether a teen is connected to resources and support
Conversely there also are protective factors that help a child in a crisis, Van-denLangenberg said. The risk for suicide-related behavior among youth and, also, the risk for bullying behavior can be reduced with protective factors, which include: family involvement school connectedness positive emotional well-being connection to resources and support when needed
“Current research is supporting